How to Run an Ahrefs Site Audit to Fix Technical SEO Issues
Broken links, slow pages, and duplicate tags quietly cap your rankings. Ahrefs Site Audit crawls your site and ranks issues by severity, but the tool is only useful if you fix the right ones first.
How Do You Start a Site Audit?
- In Ahrefs, go to Site Audit and click New project.
- Enter your domain and set the crawl scope (whole site or a subfolder).
- Add an allow/disallow list if you need to skip staging or search pages.
- Run the crawl — a 1,000-page site takes a few minutes.
- Review the Health Score and the Issues tab, sorted by importance.
What Does the Health Score Actually Measure?
It’s a weighted summary of how many crawled pages have errors or warnings. A 90+ score sounds great until you realize three critical 404s on your top landing pages can hide behind hundreds of clean blog posts. Read the issue list, not the headline number.
Which Issues Should You Fix First?
Priority follows traffic impact, not crawl count.
- Broken internal links (404s) on high-traffic pages — fix immediately.
- Missing or duplicate title tags — quick wins that affect every affected page.
- Redirect chains — each hop loses a bit of link equity.
- Slow page load — tracked via Core Web Vitals metrics.
- Orphan pages — indexed but unreachable from any link.
| Issue | Impact | Effort |
|---|---|---|
| Broken internal links | High | Low |
| Duplicate titles | Medium | Low |
| Redirect chains | Medium | Medium |
| Orphan pages | Medium | High |
How Do You Benchmark Against Competitors?
Site Audit covers your own site. To see what rivals are doing, use Site Explorer to check their referring domains and top pages. Comparing your backlink profile to theirs tells you whether you’re losing on links or on content — different fixes entirely.
How Often Should You Crawl?
Most sites get little from weekly crawls. Monthly is enough, plus a crawl after any major template or migration change. Post-migration crawls catch redirect and canonical mistakes before they cost rankings for weeks.
Where Does Ahrefs Audit Lag?
It can’t see content quality or search intent — that’s your judgment. Complex JavaScript sites occasionally return fewer URLs than Google indexes, so cross-check with Search Console. And the credit-based plan pricing means large crawls eat your monthly allowance.
Quick Summary
- Site Audit crawls your site and flags errors, warnings, and notices.
- Prioritize issues by traffic impact, not raw count.
- Broken internal links and duplicate titles are the fastest wins.
- Run monthly or after migrations, not weekly.
- Combine with Site Explorer for competitor benchmarking.